John Bordonaro:  

Hello Fellow Huskies, This is my Bio After graduation I left Olean for the big city. I went to the Washington DC area to attend the University of Maryland. What a shock it was at first to be at a University whose student population was twice that of my home town¿s population. The dorm buildings alone were taller than any building in Olean. It didn¿t take long to adjust though. Those four years were some of the best in my life. I made many great friends and had a wonderful time. Did you ever see the movie Animal House? Well, that is where I lived during school. Not in a frat house but in a house that I rented with several friends near campus. What a time we had!! I would visit Olean a couple of times per year, usually Memorial Day weekend, Labor Day weekend and Christmas holiday. I worked in Maryland during the summers holding different scientific jobs that were mostly at the University. During Christmas break of 1978 I was in Olean visiting my friends at the laboratory at the Olean General Hospital. I worked there when I was in high school. That day I met a pretty young lady there by the name of Lunette Jordan who was working in the laboratory. We started to date long distance and did so for two years. She was from Duke Center PA. We got married in July of 1980 shortly after I graduated from the University of Maryland. All my college buddies came to the wedding in Duke Center and so did our friends and relatives from the Olean area. Our wedding was the largest ever at that little Methodist church in Duke Center. In May of 1980 I graduated with a BS degree in Microbiology from the University of Maryland. In July of 1980 I married Lunette. In August of 1980 I returned to graduate school at the University of Maryland. I was working on an aging (i.e. old and in existence for a long time) grant and my classes were paid for. The grant had to do with the distribution of certain toxigenic E.coli bacteria in pig dung. Not a glamorous job but it got me out into the country quite a bit. In about October of 1980 the ¿pig poo¿ grant was up for renewal but was not renewed by the sponsor. This devastated my professor. This meant that I no longer had a job and my classes were no longer free, not to mention that the professor I was working for lost a big part of her funding. At that point I decided I should put graduate school on hold for a while and go out and earn some money. Shortly after the pig poo grant expired I saw a job advertised at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) at their Frederick Maryland Cancer Research Facility. I applied and the scientist in charge was a very nice southern man who was really hot into the newly emerging monoclonal antibody technology. He asked me if I knew what a monoclonal antibody was so I explained it to him in detail and he hired me on the spot. Fortunately I had studied it and had written a paper on it the semester that I left the University of Maryland¿s graduate program. The best thing about it was that he was also a graduate school professor at a local university called Hood College. At that time Hood was the only school in the country that had a biotechnology graduate program. It was administered over largely by the Scientists at the NIH and the classes were all taught at night. He asked me to be his graduate student and the NIH would pay my way. It worked out well for me and I taught the lab portion of one of his classes. I was only with him for about one year as the program that he was in charge of was eliminated and he and I were re-assigned to different laboratories at the NIH. The next lab I worked in was a growth factor laboratory administered over by Dr. George Todaro. He is considered a founding father of Retro-virology. I continued my education and my job with George for about two years. One day George came to me and told me that he was going to help found a biotechnology company in Seattle. He asked if I would be interested in helping him start it. At that time too many things were happening in my life and I turned him down. He went to Seattle and helped to found a company called Oncogene. I stayed in Maryland. After working with George I transferred into a new laboratory group that was managed by Dr. Charlie Morgan. He was another nice southern man and took me under his wing. I felt very lucky to work in the Biological Response Modifiers Program as it was, at the time, one of the most advanced biomedical research laboratories in the world. Charlie was also a professor at Hood so I became his graduate student and finished my degree under him. I worked with him for about two years and then one day he came to me and gave me the same line that George Todaro had. He was offered money to start a new Biotechnology Laboratory that was to be located in Seattle. He asked if I wanted to help him start it up. I again said no as I did not really want to leave the Maryland area. He came back though and ...Expand for more